StyleBooks for Citrix ADC simplify the task of managing complex Citrix ADC configurations. A StyleBook is a template that you can use to create and manage Citrix ADC configurations.
You can create a StyleBook for configuring a specific feature of Citrix ADC, or you can design a StyleBook to create configurations for an enterprise application deployment such as Microsoft Exchange or Lync.
There might be a scenario where you have to configure multiple Citrix ADC instances for a single application, but also where each ADC instance requires a different configuration to be deployed on them. An example of such a case is the default Microsoft Skype for Business StyleBook.
StyleBooks fit in well with the principles of Infrastructure-as-code that is practiced by DevOps teams, where configurations are declarative and version-controlled. The configurations are also repeated and are deployed as a whole.
In Citrix Application Delivery Management (ADM), there might be a scenario where you have to configure multiple Citrix ADC instances for a single application, but also where each ADC instance requires a different configuration to be deployed on them. An example of such a case is the default Microsoft Skype for Business StyleBook.
StyleBooks currently support the ability to create a configpack and apply the same configuration on multiple Citrix ADC instances. Such a scenario where the configuration is identical on all ADC instances, can be referred to as a symmetric configuration.
Now, with the “instance roles” feature of StyleBooks, you can create an asymmetrical configuration, that is, a configpack that can be applied on multiple ADC instances, but with different configurations on different ADC instances.
When a StyleBook with instance roles feature is used to create a configpack, each ADC instance in a configpack can be assigned a different role. This role determines the configuration objects of the configpack that the ADC instance will receive.
When using the REST API, you can specify roles for each ADC instance when creating or updating the configpack as follows. In the “targets” block, specify the UUID of the specific Citrix ADC instance on which you want to deploy the individual components.